I must admit, I am not a huge fan of Creative, but when I hard about this product it seemed *perfect* for me. See, I'm going to school in FL, and my girlfriend is going to school in MI, and the phone bills were pretty outrageous. The quality of voice over dialpad was unbearable, and it did not afford the mobility necessary when you're living in a dorm room either. (i.e. being able to walk out in the hall when your roommate is blasting his music)
So I bought two of these VOIP blasters from outpost.com for $19.95 each with free overnight shipping (I have no idea if they are still running this deal). We immediately learned of one major (for us) caveat: the VOIP dialer software necessary to operate the Creative VOIP blaster is incompatible with microsoft netmeeting. We both have webcams so we can see eachother, so it's a bit of a drag that we can't see and talk to eachother at the same time.
Voice Quality
Voice quality depends largely on your available bandwidth. My school's T1 is extremely congested on the weekends, so it is almost unbearable trying to use the VOIP blaster to communicate during those times (transfer speeds are slower than on a 28.8kbps modem during peak traffic). During the week, however, the network is not nearly as congested, and we are able to have conversations with very little delay or garbled speech. Now, voice quality is never quite as good as a real phone to phone conversation, but it's close enough for me.
PC-to-Phone
I don't recommend using this feature. Why? Well for one, it's $.05 a minute. You might as well find a good calling card and stick with that. Also, presumably because the signal has to go from your PC over the internet to the server's PC, over to the telco and then finally to the person you are calling, there is significantly more lag introduced compared to the direct PC-to-PC mode (which requires that both parties have a VOIP blaster).
Documentation
Documentation is a little sparse on this, but if you mess around with the software for a little while you should be able to figure most of it out. For some reason, my girlfriend's insist that she set it up to use a connection from dial up networking before it will allow me to call her...this is slightly problematic since she is connected over the school's lan and does not have any connections in DUN. This isn't a big deal because my software allows her to call me with no problem.
Firewalls
Creative claims that it will not work with a firewall at all, but I am using BlackICE, and with my girlfriend's IP address on the list of "trusted" addresses, there are no problems related to this.
Conclusion
For $40 total, this was well worth it for us, we have used the Creative VOIP blaster for enough time that it has already paid for itself tenfold. I would like to see creative work on the dialer software a little more, and either make it compatible with webcams or make it so that it does not interfere with netmeeting, but there is no indication that Creative has any intention in giving much support to this product just yet. Also note that you damn well better plan on hooking up your phone to this thing, because the included earpiece and microphone are utter and complete junk, and besides, why use that when you can plug in your nifty cheap VTECH cordless phone?
So I bought two of these VOIP blasters from outpost.com for $19.95 each with free overnight shipping (I have no idea if they are still running this deal). We immediately learned of one major (for us) caveat: the VOIP dialer software necessary to operate the Creative VOIP blaster is incompatible with microsoft netmeeting. We both have webcams so we can see eachother, so it's a bit of a drag that we can't see and talk to eachother at the same time.
Voice Quality
Voice quality depends largely on your available bandwidth. My school's T1 is extremely congested on the weekends, so it is almost unbearable trying to use the VOIP blaster to communicate during those times (transfer speeds are slower than on a 28.8kbps modem during peak traffic). During the week, however, the network is not nearly as congested, and we are able to have conversations with very little delay or garbled speech. Now, voice quality is never quite as good as a real phone to phone conversation, but it's close enough for me.
PC-to-Phone
I don't recommend using this feature. Why? Well for one, it's $.05 a minute. You might as well find a good calling card and stick with that. Also, presumably because the signal has to go from your PC over the internet to the server's PC, over to the telco and then finally to the person you are calling, there is significantly more lag introduced compared to the direct PC-to-PC mode (which requires that both parties have a VOIP blaster).
Documentation
Documentation is a little sparse on this, but if you mess around with the software for a little while you should be able to figure most of it out. For some reason, my girlfriend's insist that she set it up to use a connection from dial up networking before it will allow me to call her...this is slightly problematic since she is connected over the school's lan and does not have any connections in DUN. This isn't a big deal because my software allows her to call me with no problem.
Firewalls
Creative claims that it will not work with a firewall at all, but I am using BlackICE, and with my girlfriend's IP address on the list of "trusted" addresses, there are no problems related to this.
Conclusion
For $40 total, this was well worth it for us, we have used the Creative VOIP blaster for enough time that it has already paid for itself tenfold. I would like to see creative work on the dialer software a little more, and either make it compatible with webcams or make it so that it does not interfere with netmeeting, but there is no indication that Creative has any intention in giving much support to this product just yet. Also note that you damn well better plan on hooking up your phone to this thing, because the included earpiece and microphone are utter and complete junk, and besides, why use that when you can plug in your nifty cheap VTECH cordless phone?
Facebook
Twitter